


In the End

by EjBlaKit



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: An Endless Impossible Dance, Because this is how it must end, Continuation, Enemies, F/M, Forever and Always is Never Enough, Life is never easy, Lovers, There are always dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-07-07
Packaged: 2018-07-11 13:58:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7055311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EjBlaKit/pseuds/EjBlaKit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their worlds continue on after Starkiller is destroyed, an endless battle of the light and dark. An infinite, endless dance of impossibilities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

In the light of dawn, spilling hot and gold through the plum skies and murky hills, it was always the most obvious. Without the stars to map their stories the world became harsh and bitter. The sky no longer cared for them, burning away their dreams and hopes to wisps of impossibly thin clouds. 

They wore each other down, neither one ever truly giving in.

They were both stubborn, hard headed. To give in was to lose.

So they fought, constantly.

At first it was with blades, spilling hot blood over frozen ground, slashing red through the green of the trees, into the ebb of the tide. They fought hard, bitter battles that only ended when both were barely able to crawl away.

And then it was words, heated and cruel, demanding and refusing. Their barbs were sharp and finely aimed, striking deep and taking root.

The touches followed, hard at first, claws and teeth and fists and heels. Elbows knocked bruises into kidneys, knees into the gut. Hands on shoulders, fingers brushing hair behind ears, the ghost of breath against a neck, palms soft against a cheek.

Two years of ducking and weaving an endless chase through hundreds of constellations. Two years of hiding and seeking and fleeing and following. They took turns of tag, a silent agreement that this was how it was meant to be. The good chases the bad, the bad seeks out the good. The middle ground is their battles, their peace.

She kisses him for the first time over the light of their connected blades, the swirl of the fight flowing past them, into frozen tunnels and caves. They were alone, his lips soft, hands gentle and she melted into him.

He takes her in the heat of a fight, their weapons discarded, his hand covering her mouth, smothering her moans as she rides him. The bark of the tree at his back digs deep. A patrol passes within metres, oblivious to the pair as they continue to scout the Jungle. 

She washes the blood from his hands, but he still stains her with it. There's too much and she'll never scrub his skin clean. She is too pure for him, the flicker of dark anger in her soul controlled with ease, while his rages and beats and threatens to obliterate all.

In the sand they roll, her laugh pleasant, honest as his fingers move lightly, tickling her bared flesh. She peppers him with kisses and they both spend days afterwards brushing the course grains from their hair. But the ecstasy was worth it, the revitalisation, their refill, a mouthful of air in the vacuum of space, their souls starving for one another, hearts yearning and bleeding and breaking.

Rarely do they get to eat together. When they do he mocks her eating habits, slack-jawed when she's being particularly uncivilised. She always responds that it doesn't matter, no where respectable would let them dine together with a face like his. The first time she'd said it they argued loud and long. The next time they laughed. Every time they always finished their meals naked and sweaty, tracing freckles and moles along slick muscles. 

It is somewhat comfortable, what they do. They are frayed along the seams, mending where they can, unravelling where they can't. She is the light to his shadow. He can't exist without her, and she must swallow him whole. True enemies with traitorous hearts, unable to deny one another anymore than they can deny their polar opposite causes. They never speak of it, even as they compare their new scars, the mental and the physical, the only gifts they can give to one another.

The night has been long and violent and cruel. He knows she saw him do it, because he saw her watching, shoulders slumping as the fight slipped out of her. She knew what he did, but had never seen the actions. This she had seen. She stares at the bodies of the families at his feet. He can't think about the babies, because he doesn't think about the adults. They are flesh to be dealt with accordingly. He doesn't know that he should feel guilt. It has been erased from him many years ago, when she first met him. 

He doesn't see her again for another year.

It is dark.

It is long.

A never ending vortex of pain and hatred that swirls and distorts any thing and all things. 

It is a bad time and the Universe weeps with them.

They kiss hungrily amidst the carnage and there are tears in their eyes.

Her leg is new and cold.

His arm hangs useless by his side. 

This is a war one of them cannot win.

Blood coughs from his lips and stains her pallid face as she sobs. Their hearts are being ripped apart. 

'I love you.' She whispers it and his eyes are on her, searching, trying to understand.

'I love you.' He echoes, and she sees that in some strange way he actually does. This monster that she could never tame.

He falls to the earth at her feet, a dull thud drowned by the boom of ships breaking atmosphere, of blaster fire and the screams of the dying.

She wishes he had been the one to cauterise her heart instead.


	2. Part II

She stares at her hands, stares until her vision blurs with strain and tears.

There is no Universe other than this one. This one of pain and misery.

Her light flickers and she wants it to die. 

She wishes he had drowned her in his wake, taken the decision out of her shaking palms. His shadow sucking her down into the quick of everything and claiming her body and soul and spirit until she was nothing but his and only his. 

Her shoulders are firm when she delivers her report. None can know, none can ever know what this is to her.

She stares into deep brown eyes, so achingly familiar, as she says the words she had never wanted to speak but always knew she would have to. She wishes he had tried harder, been more persuasive because then she wouldn't be standing here and he wouldn't be lying there and her General wouldn't be hunched in her seat, suppressing the tears she wishes she could allow herself. 

Kylo Ren is dead.

Dead.

Fallen at her hand.

Her bloody, shaking hands.

His body was still warm when she left it.

His helmet, scarred and scorched, she keeps it in her storage chest. No one else knows about it. No one else knows she pulls it out in the dead of night and curls her body around the cold frame. It smells nothing like him. It smells of metal and death and war. Those were parts of him, but they were not his core and his core smelt like earth and charcoal and pine. It does not smell of him, but it was a part of him and it is the only part she has left. The face of a monster she can no longer caress. The hideous face of a past she is unwilling to forget.

The stars stare knowingly at her, musing from their blackened thrones, faces cold and white as they reign silent judgement down upon her. The Universe witnesses all. Voluminous gas clouds slowly swirling into a frenzy of energy and completion, only to devour themselves into graves of inhaling destruction. A sad, slow dance that the Makers feel no pity for. And if they feel no pity for the slow and inevitable death of their creation, they certainly feel no pity for the death of him.

The heart of space is cold and desolate and she uses the time to sit and stare into the vortex, refusing to meet her thoughts and feel what she should not be feeling.

She can feel the give of flesh against the edge of her blade.

She has felt it before, many a time in the line of duty.

She has felt his flesh before, many a time before in the line of duty.

But never like this.

She never wanted it to be like this. But he did and that's why she's here, because he wanted it. Because his vengeance and misery would have flooded planets and collapsed worlds. 

She is so insular and alone. 

She does not have that power, and so he made the choice.

She can feel the vortex slipping into her mind, thickened tendrils, dark and odious seeping through her pores and into her thoughts. They cloud and twist and she can smell and taste the bitterness, the acrid inflections of their intent. Now is when she should use her light, that inner power to burn away the nothingness, but she doesn't. She can't. 

He was a creature of this, so she would be too.

A husk, floating in space, to be consumed by space.

_Don't let it._

The words float lazily through her head, silent to her ears. There is nothing save the thrum of the engines for her to hear, and even those are only on for life support. She is not going anywhere, has nowhere to go. 

The words are thick and muffled, slurred with sedation and a consciousness winks and flares in the back of her mind. A door slowly slipping open, a line of light expanding gradually against the building wall of shadow. The darkness shifts and champs, rearing at the intrusion, pushing and failing, retreating from her until there is nothing but a glow and she rages in response. Rages against the intrusion, against the loss of what had once consumed him. But the door keeps opening, allowing her a glimpse to the other side, to a world of turmoil and frustration. 

It's so bitter, so familiar.

Her heart clenches tightly in her chest until she can't breathe.

She stares out at the stars.

They glimmer a soft warmth back to her, beckoning timidly, offering her the chance of a new hope.


	3. Part III

It's a lie, she tells herself as the ship settles with a heavy groan. 

It has to be a lie, some act to draw her into the open, to vanquish her once and for all.

The last Jedi.

The last light Force user in the known Galaxy.

The flickering glimmer of something, calling and beckoning with growing impatience and frantic urgency. It grows stronger still as she steps onto the planet and breaths in the air. Frost-nipped, icy. She is surrounded by blankets of white, it swirls in eddies about her face and tangles in her hair, on her lashes.

A shiver runs through her, though she doesn't know whether it is from the cold or from something else. 

There is no one here. 

No animal, no plant, no person, no droid.

The landing strip is deserted, barren.

A trap.

A huge, empty cage to rise about her and lock her tight. To freeze her to this barren wasteland. She waits for it to spring, for the explosion of action and the flurry of plasma blasts. 

But nothing.

The howl of the wind is low and mournful, crying sadly across desolate ranges of nothing upon nothing upon nothing.

She finally begins to walk, light boots crunching on undisturbed snow. She can feel the grit of it in her teeth, feel it grind in her ears. It is not entirely unpleasant.

The doorway is summoning, pulling, tugging, and she lets it guide her towards an unobtrusive building, almost completely swallowed by the world. The door opens at her presence. The interior is warm, almost stifling at first and she gasps to regulate her lungs, decompress her system.

There is only one trail of lights, and so she follows it.

She has no fear in this place where her footsteps bounce back to her and the windows are black under the thick layers of ice. A generator is humming somewhere, low and clunking. The overheads flicker once, but remain on. 

Like a dream she hears the crackling of plasma, can almost feel the solid heat of red wash through her skin and she thinks that maybe this time it will all be over. The warmth in her heart is signalling the end. He has finally claimed her as she claimed him. It is done.

_Come._

The voice is in her head, always and only in her head. She questions nothing about it, accepting only of this strange life she now lives. Of scars and battles, of little sleep and too much pressure. 

She is the last Jedi, somehow. She never asked for this life, never requested this mission. She never even enlisted. It just was. And just as things were, so things would be. And so she did. She existed to serve something she did not fully understand, to fight enemies she understood all too well.

He stands facing her, his arm cold metal in sympathy with her leg.

They stare at one another for almost an eternity.

Star systems explode into existence and are eaten away by the erosion of their suns in the time they stand. 

Governments come to power and fade away. 

People are born, make love, and die.

And still they stand and stare. Silence. Thick. Heavy. Vibrating. Comforting. 

'I'm sorry.' She whispers it. She can feel the pressure of her saber piercing through cloth and bone and muscle and flesh. She can feel the give of it as he goes slack against her. She has dreamt of it every night. Dreamt of it while she slept, and in her waking moments. She can feel it at all times of the day, ever present, a part of her now. An unwanted, irremovable part echoing up and down her arm and into her soul.

'I am too.' His eyes are sad, his hair is long. His torso is bare and she can see what she has done. It hurts her in a way it has every right to. 

She throws her weapon to the floor and spreads her arms, accepting.

He looks at her with dark, familiar eyes and slowly shakes his head.

'No.' He murmurs. 'Never.' 

She collapses into his embrace and never wants to let go.

Outside the wind howls with the oncoming storm. The building is drowning under the pressure, frozen in time and space. The clouds are black and green and grey and blue. And then they are white. The world is white. The universe is white. Blindingly, startlingly white.


End file.
